Learning to Be a Man

DIY

When you get married, you get presents. Presents are awesome. Getting married to a great woman is also awesome. So don’t think that loving presents somehow takes away from the love I have for my wife. Okay? Point is, you get some great gifts.

For our wedding, we registered for and received dishes from Crate & Barrel. These plates and bowls and mugs and saucers have been through a lot. A couple were chipped. One was cracked. Every time I ate something hot out of it, I could hear the crack grow. I expected it to split at any moment and for my food to fall everywhere.

Why did I keep using it? Because I like to live on the edge. Read more

I’m working on an inexpensive outdoor kitchen right now, which I’ll blog about soon. Of course one of the most important aspects of every outdoor kitchen is your grill or cooking apparatus. Whether it’s a charcoal or gas grill, you have to build your kitchen to work with what you have.

Since I have two Webers and hopefully a third coming soon, I built my kitchen differently. Instead of building around the grills, I’m instead making the grills adapt to the kitchen. Basically, I want my grills to be mobile. I have essentially created a bullpen for the grills. I line them up and only pull out the one I need at the time and then park it next to my kitchen. With the Weber Charcoal grill, it comes with wheels and a handle so you can move it around.

The Smokey Mountain Cooker, however, is super lame and doesn’t have wheels. You pretty much plant it and leave it there for its entire life. Or if you want to move it, you have to take it apart and move the pieces or carry the entire thing.

The Five years ago, I convinced my wife to leave her life and pretty good job to come live with me in Los Angeles. I don’t know how I did it. I must be some kind of superhero and my power is to convince beautiful women to drop everything for me. Fortunately, I’ve only ever used my powers on her.

Like most young couples just starting out, our first apartment was pretty small. It was studio in DC. How we lived there without murdering each other is beyond me. Our second place was a one bedroom in West Hollywood. Then our third apartment was a two bedroom in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Each place got progressively larger. But they each had one thing in common: not enough closet space. Read more

Since we moved into our house, we’ve been looking for creative and inexpensive ways to decorate. Most of decor so far is repurposing our existing stuff. Whether it’s an IKEA hack to make our old shit look new and classier or turning a tennis racket into wall art, the basic idea is create something new without emptying the wallet.

That led to our guest bedroom. My wife and I want to be amazing hosts. We want people to stay the night with us, then leave and even though we’re not a business, we want them to write reviews for us on Yelp so other friends can find it and think to themselves, “Shit, we should really stay with Ashley and Ryan.”

So far we’ve received good word of mouth. Maybe they’re just being polite, I don’t know. But I choose to believe that I’m a kick ass host.

As an awesome host, you want to kill it with the guest room because that will be their home away from home. We kept getting hung up on what kind of art to hang. If we have friends stay often, they’re going to see the same stuff all the time because we don’t want to redecorate very often.

How can we keep things the same while still seeming fresh and new with every visit?

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I'm a writer in Los Angeles. I'm in my mid-thirties and I'm still trying to figure out what it means to be a man. Come here to watch me fuck it up.
You can read some of my writing at The Way I Remember It. If you're looking for a digital agency check out my company Something Creative. And last, but not least, if you're a dog owner and want some of the most amazing dog sh*t bags, check out my company Biz Bagz.